It's funny when you grow up and surround yourself with tales of love and romance. And you begin to absorb, project, create fantasies of someone loving you, choosing you, fighting for you. Your physical characteristics sure, but to love what's deep within, the good, the bad and the ugly and unhealed. You cling to the idea that you are capable of being loved. Of being worthy of love.
You begin to chase it. Wrong people spawn in but you don't see alarms, you see opportunity. On a quest to obtain the feeling, the dream. To be chosen. To be loved. To be understood. You stray from your path, anywhere in an attempt to conquer love. To be worthy of love. You've seen other people have it, so why can't you? Off you venture into the unhealed, seeking to fill their gaps to make you whole, to make you finally loveable.
Only when it's too late, the spark is gone, damage is done, you realise the cost. When you are stood in the mirror, eyes sunken, colour faded, no recollection of who you are. You lost yourself whilst chasing love. But you didn't get love did you? You got a lesson.
You betrayed yourself and paid the price with interest.
Slowly you begin to return to yourself, picking up fragmented parts of yourself while lessons now carry a heavy weight onto your shoulders.
Now you know what love is not and the cost of chasing love.
Now you no longer dream of love. You fear it.
Instead of dreaming about love, you dream about where you would have been. You dream about the day when memory fades and your shoulders are relieved from a weight. You dream of a reset button, knowing the exact date and time you would go back to and do it differently. But you can't.
The lesson became your shield.
Do not betray yourself for love if it means sacrificing yourself.